In the field of skin cooling for dermatologic treatment procedures it is generally known to provide skin cooling during treatment by the use of cryogen cooling air.
From JP 203000334 A2 it is for instance known to provide air cooling by the use of a cooling arrangement in which the cooling air is provided from the cold side of a Peltier-element, where the warm side of said Peltier-element is water cooled. The cooled air having a temperature in the range of −15-−10° C. is blown out through a handheld applicator, which is connected with the Peltier-element through an air hose.
It is also known from WO 99/05978 to use supercooled tetrafluoroethane having a temperature of −26° C. to cool an area of treatment during a surgical procedure.
Furthermore it is known from WO 00/23018 to use a supercooled airflow to cool a skin-contacting surface.
These prior art skin cooling methods have several drawbacks. First of all the use of sub-zero cooling air temperatures to achieve sufficient skin cooling generally provide an inconvenient risk of inflicting chill damage to the skin undergoing treatment. Also there is risk of a formation of ice crystals in the flow of cooling air, potentially inflicting damage on the treatment apparatus and skin undergoing treatment.
Moreover when a transparent skin-contacting surface is placed in the beam path for cooling the skin undergoing treatment this imposes a loss of electromagnetic energy as the emitted electromagnetic energy must pass through the skin-contacting surface on its way to the treatment region. Therefore, the prior art methods are relatively energy consuming, and the applicators used in connection with the known methods are rather complicated and impractical in use.
Hence it is the object of the invention to provide a skin cooling method and a skin cooling apparatus by which the abovementioned drawbacks are eliminated or reduced significantly and that will simplify dermatologic treatment procedures considerably.